Somewhat to my surprise, I've chomped through the whole of the rest of part 2 this afternoon. I am significantly happier with it than I have ever been; I need to do my timeline chart again to see how much different it looks; but it feels to me as if something significant has changed in the structure.
The next job is to fire up Smashwords and see if I can make it Kindle friendly, so I can press it on unsuspecting victims, and have them read it to tell me what I've missed out which needs to go back in; there will definitely be some of that, but I refuse to worry about it. That which I feared I would never be able to do has, in fact, been done, and in time for the new year, too.
2013 marks 10 years since I first sketched out an idea for a short story. It would be really nice if I spent the year trying to sell the thing rather than trying to endlessly rewrite it. Stay tuned; and if you have a Kindle and fancy reading two-thirds of a novel, just let me know
Oh, and Happy New Year (we're not there yet, but it's not so far away now)
Revised word count: 86,168 - down from 97,742: nearly 12%. Pretty much on track...